This post is also available in Spanish here and in Portuguese here.
Patricia Mateo Tomás talks us through her and colleagues’ new study which aims to assess how remotely tracking wildlife can contribute to the better monitoring of environmental laws. Through experimentally tracking wolves and vultures via GPS, researchers were able to locate a total of 489 livestock carcasses across Spain and Portugal.
Weak enforcement of environmental law compromises nature conservation
Contrasting with the good news of the global rise in environmentally-concerned legal instruments and institutions, weak enforcement of existing conservation laws compromises the effectiveness of these instrumental tools for biodiversity conservation worldwide. In this context, monitoring is an integral part of the law implementation process, not only to evaluate the degree of law enforcement and compliance, but also to identify implementation gaps and adapt accordingly.
Different environmental parameters susceptible to be affected by regulations are tracked for monitoring, including the use of living organisms (i.e., biomonitoring), a powerful tool due to its capacity of synthesizing information from complex systems over whole areas. For example, lichens are used for assessing compliance in industrial activities emitting air pollutants while fishes help to monitoring water quality, and analysing the gizzard content of waterfowl has even allowed to assess compliance with bans on lead ammunition in wetlands.
The overlooked potential of remotely tracked wildlife for law enforcement
The rise of remote tracking technologies in the last decades has added a new dimension to the concept of biomonitoring, traditionally linked to disciplines such as chemistry or ecotoxicology, i.e., the use of space-based systems such as satellite imagery or global positioning system (GPS) devices for detailed monitoring of wildlife.
From tracking pollution in ecosystems to detecting illegal persecution of wildlife, these applications have a strong potential to inform conservation and management policies. Besides informing on direct threats causing species mortality or habitat degradation, GPS-tracked animals can provide additional insights on the level of compliance with law. For instance, GPS-tagged albatrosses detected unreported fishing vessels while GPS-tagged jaguars and vultures have been reported as victims of illegal persecution, de facto indicating a lack of compliance with regulations for species conservation.
GPS-tracking of scavengers to monitor carcass disposal
To illustrate the potential of GPS-tagged wildlife for monitoring the level of compliance with law, we tracked the activity of 21 griffon vultures (Gyps fulvus) and 13 Iberian wolves (Canis lupus signatus) equipped with GPS devices in Spain and Portugal. Both species are perfectly suited for our purpose of finding livestock carcasses abandoned in the field. Griffon vultures are obligate scavengers highly specialized for the efficient location of dead animals over vast areas from the air. Contrastingly, wolves retain the flexibility of feeding by either predation or scavenging, being frequently recorded as facultative scavengers.
The carcasses found by GPS-tracking the activity of vultures and wolves allowed us to assess the level of compliance with European regulations 1069/2009 and 142/2011. These regulations were implemented to align biodiversity conservation with public health by authorizing the disposal of livestock carcasses in the field for feeding scavengers.
Assessing compliance
Sentinel scavengers helped us to locate 489 livestock carcasses across three Spanish autonomous regions and the north of Portugal. On-ground visits to the carcasses revealed an important mismatch between the on-paper and in-reality implementation of these regulations. While less than half of the carcasses were placed in authorized areas, compliance with all the criteria required for livestock carcass disposal (e.g., from carcass characteristics such as species, age, or production system to its location far away from water, buildings, power lines, windfarms, or roads) ranged from 0 to 4.2 %, with no major differences between regions with uneven implementation.
The major gaps in compliance identified so far pointed towards insufficient and over-bureaucratized designation of Scavenger Feeding Zones (SFZs), where fallen livestock can be left in situ for feeding wildlife. The indiscriminate nature of distance criteria from carcasses to watercourses, buildings, and infrastructure further affected compliance.
Identifying enforcement gaps
Accordingly, declaring new livestock grazing areas as SFZs and simplifying the bureaucracy required for farmers to take advantage of these regulations would be among the measures improving the level of compliance. A systematic on-ground monitoring of carcasses would be recommended to gather valuable information for better assessment of the actual effectiveness of the EU sanitary regulations in reconciling scavenger conservation and public health, and informing potential modifications to achieve these objectives.
Our results show how GPS-tagged wildlife can act as sentinels of compliance with law. In the concrete case of GPS-tracking of vertebrate scavengers, they allowed:
- the on-ground monitoring of carcasses
- the addressing of potential risks for wildlife, livestock and human health
- the quantitative assessment of compliance with the law
- better estimates of carcass availability, substantially contributing to more effective legislation enforcement.
Likewise, given the increasing availability of information from GPS-tagged wildlife, a strong potential exists to monitor compliance with different regulations affecting biodiversity conservation almost anywhere on the planet.
Read the full article “Wildlife as sentinels of compliance with law: An example with GPS-tagged scavengers and sanitary regulations” in Journal of Applied Ecology
